Contents

Why Linux?
Unlike Windows and Mac OS X, which cost money and offer (with some minor exceptions) only one set of features and capabilities for all users, Linux is free and comes in many different flavors. Regardless of what the person on your list likes to do, you’ll almost certainly be able to find the perfect distro for him or her. And if you can’t, you can probably roll your own—try doing that with Windows.

Do Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs really need any more money? I think not. Rather than giving Microsoft or Apple any of your money during these frugal days, keep your cash and go with Linux instead.

In order to emulate these results, you’ll need the Linux kernel 2.6.31, a modified version of X.org 1.7, and supported hardware and drivers. So we’re not quite at the point where you can just pick up a netbook with a multitouch display, install Fedora or another Linux distro, and expect to tap your way to bliss with up to 10 fingers on the screen. But we’re getting closer.

GNU/Linux (especially 2.6.18+)
Never has their been such an uproar in computing as a free kernel and free utilities– all done very well with rapid, mindful if darwinian skill. Linus Torvalds crafted Linux, and has been holding on for dear life ever since. Coupled with the GNU utilities and two main window manager branches (Gnome and KDE), Linux underpinnings now grace objects from tiny wristwatches and clever cell/mobile phones, to IBM mainframes and everything in between. The promise of Linux for civilians is slowly but surely being realized through distros like Ubuntu, Novell/SUSE, Mandrive, Knoppix, and others, but the enterprise server market belongs to Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, and communities formed around each of these. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t worth in the literally hundreds of distros out there.

Twenty Ten

Everyone has posted their predictions for 2010 but here’s the real scoop on what’s going to happen in 2010 with Linux and Linux-oriented hardware and software products. Get ready to see the biggest increase in Linux adoption in history. You can say you saw it here first. These are in no particular ranking or order.

If your new year’s resolution is to kick the Microsoft habit, here are some Linux versions you might want to look at.

Switching to a new operating system is never easy. Particularly if you were brought up on a staple diet of Microsoft Windows. But it’s not as hard as it used to be to switch to Linux because there is a good selection of quality Linux versions that are easy to install and comfortable to use.

Applications

The free open source vector graphics editor Inkscape has released an update packing several new features, new tools, effects, and improved SVG compliance. Version 0.47 is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, as well as source code. Ubuntu users can also add the Inkscape Testers package archive to automatically upgrade.

It was a little rough getting there, but KDE 4 has reached a point where I’m using it on all my machines. The pain was worth it (barely) and KDE is by far the most satisfying desktop environment for my personal use.

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If you are in the market for a new bittorrent client, especially once based in QT – I highly recommend giving qBittorrent a look. It’s a solid and reliable client with well implemented features and under active development so chances are good it will continue to improve!

Instructionals

So, there you have it. A rather long description for what is really a rather easy process. As I said at the beginning, if you have Bluetooth and aren’t using it, you are missing out on some convenience and functionality that you would probably like. it’s not hard, especially if you start out like I did, and just get a Bluetooth mouse. You can have it connected in less than a minute, and the confirmation that your system has Bluetooth, and it works, is a good feeling. The experience you gain from doing that can be used for the next step, which might be connecting your mobile phone, and transferring pictures. Then you’re really on your way!

So, we spoke about a list of top pentesting livecd’s here. We might have to update that list soon! Pentoo is a Live CD and Live USB designed for penetration testing and security assessment. Based on Gentoo Linux, Pentoo includes Nessus and Metasploit for penetration testing and security assessment. The user interface is the Enlightenment window manager. Pentoo is optimized for Pentium III architecture. Pentoo supports package modularity in the same fashion that Slax does.

Debian Family

Microsoft has restricted Windows 7 Starter to make sure it’s no competition for the more full-featured versions of Windows 7. For example, “It’s got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That ringing endorsement for Windows 7 Starter Edition was made by some guy named Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

Ubuntu 9.10, however, is an excellent desktop Linux distribution. While I’ll be the first to admit that Ubuntu 9.10 has its rough-edges when you install it yourself on some systems, Dell has always done an excellent job of fitting Ubuntu on its systems.

The recent release of a major new version of Ubuntu means it’s time for new versions of various remastered distros. This time around it’s Linux Mint 8. Linux Mint, as you may already know from previous releases, takes Ubuntu to another level by slicking it up with tools, multimedia codecs and more. Linux Mint 8 makes it easy to get started with Linux even if you haven’t run it before. Pretty much everything you need for your daily computing tasks is included in Linux Mint 8 or available in the Linux Mint software repository.

This write-up was intended as a very high-level review of my experience setting up this unusual system, and is by no means a step-by-step walkthrough. There is plenty of detailed information available online on websites such as plugcomputer.org and computingplugs.com that can prove invaluable to get things working on the SheevaPlug. As remarked before, the system is sold as a developer’s kit and setting it up is definitely not for the faint of heart or for those who avoid the terminal like the plague. In the end, I had a lot of fun getting this to work and the system is working beautifully. I learned a lot in the process and am amazed yet again at how flexible Debian is as an operating system for just about any computer, even embedded systems like this one.

Look up open source. You’ll get 203,000,000 results. How come? While credit goes to many, including Bruce Perens, who chose the term, I see widespread usage largely as the direct result of a “call to the community” by Eric S. Raymond on 8 February 1998. Plus the runaway successes of Linux, Apache and thousands of other open source code bases, and the Internet they all run on. (And the Net is essentially a pile of open and free protocols.)

As demonstrated by the nearly 500 open source downloads on this list, open source software has benefited from an explosion of creativity in the last several years. Indeed, the first decade of the 21st century could be called “the Decade of Open Source.”

Since 2006, Datamation has put together at least 15 different lists of open source software, for file sharing, enterprises, small businesses, windows users, netbooks, security professionals, and others. (And check out the hot new open source list from late 2009). For this list of open source downloads, we revisited all those applications that we’ve featured before, culled out the projects that are no longer active (or no longer open source), made updates, and organized them alphabetically in categories.

CMS

Following hot on the heels of US President Barack Obama, Albert II, King of the Belgians, just relaunched his website on Drupal. Check it out at http://www.monarchie.be. The site was built by Connexion.

Programming

A Qt application, running inside the Native Client sandbox, inside the Firefox browser Vergrößern
Source: Qt Labs A first shot at creating a port of the Qt toolkit to Google’s Native Client (NaCL) environment allows Qt applications to run as applets within a browser. The port is not yet complete, but it already offers mouse and keyboard support, rudimentary support for the QtGUI and QtCore libraries and several more complex widgets. The biggest problem with the current port though is that the event handling in NaCL is polling based which makes applications spin using 100% of the CPU; the developers descibe this as “not quite our preferred style”.

Finance

Talk about a slap in the face. Goldman Sachs (GS), in a bid to keep employees away from the UK’s new onerous bonus tax, is threatening to shift a chunk of its London bankers over to highly troubled spain.

They’re not going to take it sitting down. Goldman Sachs told the British Treasury that it would move up to 20 percent of its London staff to Spain if the government does not relent on plans for a windfall tax on bonuses, The Independent writes.

In the first six months of 2010, about 6,000 employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take a break from their spreadsheets and move across the southern tip of Manhattan to a new 43-story, steel-and-glass skyscraper.

The Goldman PAC raised $205,000 in the past month, so these are just initial numbers, but the early filings show that Goldman is hitting up the left, the right and the center, but the company is also being opportunistic. Waters is the third ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and Lincoln is chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee — which could have a role in regulation of derivatives.

Working people, seniors and oraganizers from Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, Americans for Financial Reform, NY Jobs for justice, NYPIRDG posed as carol singers today outside the New York downtown offices of Goldman Sachs on West Street protesting the banks plan to hand out $150 billion compensation and bonuses today.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again